PROVIDENCE — While candidate Kenneth J. Block spends $9,500 a month on campaign billboards, one of his potential opponents in the 2014 race for governor is getting free face time in TV ads and a prominently...

PROVIDENCE — While candidate Kenneth J. Block spends $9,500 a month on campaign billboards, one of his potential opponents in the 2014 race for governor is getting free face time in TV ads and a prominently placed billboard alongside Route 95.

From a billboard overlooking the highway, Providence Mayor Angel Taveras welcomes the national tour of “Evita!” to the Providence Performing Arts Center.

The mayor also is featured in three alternating TV ads that urge Rhode Islanders to “head downtown for hip shopping, stellar restaurants and a vibrant nightlife” in a city with lots of parking places that also “has lots of cool things to do for the whole family.”

Each of the ads ends with a beaming Taveras in his City Hall office saying: “Come visit us in Providence today.”

The performance center is footing the bill for the billboard and The Providence Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau paid the estimated $80,000 to produce and air the TV ads from late July through the first week in September.

But Block, who is waging his second campaign for governor, is crying foul.

“While it supposedly advertises the show, ‘Evita,’” Block said of the billboard, “the only thing you can make out on the billboard is Mayor Taveras. … From a campaign-finance perspective, the mayor should have paid for this advertising.”

“I am paying $9,500 a month for my billboards,” Block said. “My campaign provides the funding, and we document the expenditures with the Board of Elections. That’s how the system is meant to work.”

In response, Taveras’ spokesman, David Ortiz, said: “The mayor sees himself as an ambassador for our city. He’s the mayor of Providence, and it is his job to be personally involved in these efforts.”

Ortiz said the TV ads and the billboard reflect this personal, hands-on “approach to marketing our city. … He greets every conference that comes to Providence, [and] as part of his message of welcome, gives out his cellphone number and invites people to call him if anything comes up.”

Ortiz would not comment on the campaign fairness and finance issues raised by Block.

State law does not prohibit a political officeholder in Rhode Island from appearing in ads funded, in whole or in part, by taxpayer dollars under his or her control until 120 days before an election in which he or she is a candidate.

Lynn Singleton, the longtime executive director of the Providence Performing Arts Center, said the center’s marketing team came up with the concept for the billboard as one way to “make a big deal out of the opening” of the national tour of “Evita!” in Providence on Sept. 8.

He said the billboard was patterned after one featuring a cutout of then-Mayor Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci that welcomed “Phantom of the Opera” to the performance center in the mid-1990s.

Joseph Walsh, a State House lobbyist and former Warwick mayor who is chairman of the center’s board of directors, did not respond to a Journal inquiry. But Singleton said politics had no role in the decision to feature Taveras on the billboard.

“I am trying to sell tickets and make the company feel they are welcome in Providence,” he said.

Kristen Adamo, the vice president of marketing and communications for the convention and visitors bureau, acknowledged that the TV ads — produced in-house — were the result of a “partnership with the mayor.”

“We initiated a conversation about doing a singular commercial for ‘WaterFire’ … and then after we had done that and produced it … [and] he liked it, … that’s when they reached out to us about partnering with them on something they were thinking about.”

The ad campaign was designed to encourage Rhode Islanders who are enjoying the state’s beaches and other locales outside the capital “to come back into the city during the summer with their families,” Adamo said.

When she was asked about the mayor’s role in the process, Adamo said Taveras suggested the ads draw attention to places — such as the Museum of Natural History and planetarium in Roger Williams Park — that people might not know about.

While the visitors bureau receives no funding from the city, Adamo said its activities, including the ad campaign, are financed by the city’s share of the state’s hotel tax.

This is one of the issues that irks Block, the businessman and software engineer who founded the Rhode Island Moderate Party. Block finished fourth in a field of seven three years ago and announced his second run for governor in May.

“The convention and visitors bureau is funded by taxpayer dollars. When the bureau takes these dollars and then funnels them into a candidate’s campaign, that is a misuse of those dollars,” Block said.

While Taveras has not announced which office he intends to seek in 2014, he had the highest approval rating of any of the potential candidates for governor in the last Brown University poll. Taveras and state General Treasurer Gina Raimondo are considered likely Democratic primary challengers to incumbent Lincoln D. Chafee.

As Block sees it, “Taveras and Raimondo are [both] using taxpayer dollars to fund their political campaigns for higher office, even while they rake in significant campaign donations.”

Raimondo is “abusing public resources” in a somewhat different way, he said, with her “smart money tour” of farmers’ markets and senior centers across the state. Raimondo’s aide, Joy Fox, defended the tour on Friday as a way to “promote Treasury programs” and educate people about “ways to find and save money.” Block called it “a thinly veiled excuse to practice retail politics on the taxpayer dime.”

“In reality, she is looking for reasons to shake hands and meet voters, instead of doing her job,” he said.

As of June 30, Block had $73,987 in his campaign account, Taveras $692,590 and Raimondo $2,063,548.